Tips for Creating a Multi-Language Website

In today’s world, it is important to make your website and your business stand out against the rest. You want to make sure you are highlighting everything that makes you special and most notably… what makes you the best option for potential consumers, patients, or customers. We recently had the pleasure of working with Dr. Rob Bailey of Access Family Dental in Durham to update his website. His existing site was over 10 years old, not responsive/mobile friendly, and wasn’t developed with a scalable content management system in place. One of the other things that was especially important for Dr. Bailey? Highlighting a major point of differentiation from his competitors – the fact that he is bilingual and speaks both English and Spanish fluently.

Creating a Multi-Language Site

When we started working on Access Family Dental’s new website, we knew we wanted to figure out a way that we could make potential Spanish-speaking clients feel welcome and make the website useable for the practice’s current Spanish-speaking clients. Our team researched affordable and sustainable options available, as well as best practices for implementation. The approach we advised Dr. Bailey to consider was to make the full site available in both English and Spanish. How would we do it without going to the cost of developing two sites? And how would we keep both versions up to date? Since the new site we designed for Dr. Bailey was built on WordPress, we jumped right into evaluating plugins that would be able to translate the website from English to Spanish and came across TranslatePress.

About TranslatePress

TranslatePress allows users to translate their WordPress site directly from the front end. Here’s how it works:

  • First, download and install the plugin. We only needed the Personal version so the cost to our client was a reasonable $79 per year. If you are need to translate more than one site, TranslatePress offers other versions available that are a little more expensive
  • The Personal version includes:
    • Use on one site
    • Advanced translation interface
    • Support for dynamic fields
    • Integration with Google Translate
    • Flexible language switcher
    • SEO Pack Addon
  • Once installed, the plugin will appear under “Setting” in the left-hand menu
  • From there, you can start translating your site string-by-string

How the Translating Works

Unfortunately, automating translation via Google Translate requires an additional investment in Google’s Translate API, which was more than we advised our client to bite into at the time. We chose to translate the site ourselves to save a little money for our client, especially since Access Family Dental won’t frequently be adding new landing pages or blog posts. (If frequent content updates had been a concern, we might have advised the greater investment in automation.)

Creating a Multi-Language Site

In the screenshot above, you will see the box that reads, “Select string to translate”. When you click on it, you will get options from the words on the screen. After you choose what you would like to translate, it will appear in the “From English” box. Once translated, paste the text in Spanish in the “To Español de México” box and click “Save translation”. After you complete each string, you can hit the “Next” button and it will take you to the next string of text on the page.

Our team went page by page and translated the entire site. Once we were done, we viewed the page in Spanish (using the handy “Switcher” button that appears persistently in the lower right corner of the screen) to make sure we did not miss anything.

How It Looks to Your Site Visitors

As seen in the screenshots above (click to enlarge), at the bottom right of each page, visitors can toggle between the languages available – in this case, English or Spanish.

What We Love About This Plugin

TranslatePress is a great option for this price point. We especially love the free SEO Pack Addon which includes:

  • Slug Translation
  • Page Title and Description translation
  • Image alt tag translation
  • Facebook Social Graph tags translation
  • Yoast SEO Sitemap supports

The plugin was easy to use and we were able to translate the site quickly, saving our client valuable billable time. Our client’s website also has many forms that include dropdown options. Through the plugin, we were even able to translate the forms easily! (Call us high maintenance, but we were especially impressed that even forms were included in this plugin’s capabilities.)

Ready to Create a Multi-Language Site?

We would love to help! Please email Info@RaleighwoodMedia.com, call us at 919-229-9725, or fill out the form at the link below. ¡Esperamos trabajar con yoy!

Reader interactions

One Reply to “Tips for Creating a Multi-Language Website”

  1. Thank you Tara and the rest of the team at Raleighwood Media Group! The site turned out great in both English and Spanish. I really appreciate all the research you put in to help make the translation both correct and affordable. Whatever translation tool was used on my old website by the previous designer did not translate properly. I am very happy with the results. Thank you!

Comments are closed.